The flip side is that I would rather use a “slightly subpar” implementation than having to roll my own from a Google search and some smart guessing.
For example, if you want to implement a Student's t-test, you soon will run into the problem that you want to have a Beta function or the gamma function.
One could probably copy-paste a somewhat working version together from search engines, add asserts to prevent me from ever calling them with arguments out of the range where it seems to work, but for most of us, the result likely will be slower and less precise than a version that gcc, clang, or commercial compilers would provide.
And yes, I could probably buy an implementation somewhere, but in the real world, that often isn’t a real option, and even then, I wouldn’t know how well it worked, either.
For example, if you want to implement a Student's t-test, you soon will run into the problem that you want to have a Beta function or the gamma function.
One could probably copy-paste a somewhat working version together from search engines, add asserts to prevent me from ever calling them with arguments out of the range where it seems to work, but for most of us, the result likely will be slower and less precise than a version that gcc, clang, or commercial compilers would provide.
And yes, I could probably buy an implementation somewhere, but in the real world, that often isn’t a real option, and even then, I wouldn’t know how well it worked, either.